


The Way Before You

by ERNest



Category: Princess Tutu, Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Aestheticism, Animal Death, Art as Metaphor, Catharsis, Dancing, Disillusionment, Drawing, Duelling, Emotional Manipulation, Existential Dread, F/F, Friendship, Heartless Dolls, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Moving On, Music as metaphor, Nostalgia, Oscar Wilde would be proud, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Peer Pressure, Self-Discovery, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Tatatsuki Shiori briefly mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22309312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Wherever Anthy Himemiya goes, a garden blooms. Even if she doesn’t stay for long, if she cared at all the roots stay put and the petals drift into a river to guide her classmates there. Thus, the latest round of Duelists finds themselves in Gold Crown Town.This is not their final destination, merely a stopping point in their paths, which may shape them in preparation for the next one.
Relationships: Arisugawa Juri/Malen (Princess Tutu), Kaoru Miki/Mytho (Princess Tutu), Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue: Anthy

This time the Prince is the one in need of rescue, but then he always was. Mytho is not her prince and she neither loved him once nor is obligated to take his swords for him. Because Anthy has no reason to care about or for him, she is able to see him as a person picked out of the crowd, and if she wants to care it _means_ something because it is her choice.

All his color and life is locked away somewhere else. He doesn’t seem to be hurt by this, but he never volunteers information unless asked a direct question, so his apparent placidness is no signifier. Anthy knows what it’s like to be heartless doll, and there’s little she can do but sit with him in silence, which she does.

He made a choice once, she knows, maybe for the world, and maybe for one person _in_ the world, and since then he has had no choice but to make the same choice again and again. No one can force him to walk away but she hopes someone nudges open his coffin lid. A gasp of light _is_ a revolution after all. But she has her own revolution to follow and the prince she seeks is not in Gold Crown Town. She presses Mytho’s hand with her own before she gets up, and of course he barely responds.

“Oh?” she says softly at the tugging on the hem of her skirt. “Chu-Chu, what’s this?” The little monkey stops crying and leads her down the path. The perfect lawns and darling cobblestone streets soon give way to wretched trees and curling fog, and she is glad not only to have a friend but that he is brightly colored and easy to follow. Something always happens in the forest, not always bad but often enough to make her wary. Here on the fringe of the story where it’s not all been decided, Anthy can hear the faint scratching of a pen, and she shivers.

The mist parts to show a pond which makes her smile, and she turns just in time to see a school dress fall to the ground, empty. The heart she’s recently regained catches on itself and she presses three fingers to her mouth wondering what is to be done when she’s arrived too late. She’s worn a similar costume before, no more real than the rest, so she cannot help the pain at revisiting this moment. But in all her rehearsals and line readings she’s never been a prince, and the air will not echo in a way that teaches her where to find the missing girl.

She clenches her fist to remind herself that not all princesses can be saved and she is not to be blamed when someone is lost. Still, she is braced against a punishment that’s not coming, her own muscles causing the tension if a sword will not, and then –

“Hello, little duck!” she calls to the bird that emerges from the folds of fabric. “What a charming red pendant you have. I knew someone else who wore a locket close to her heart always, only – only I hope you are not as lonely as Juri-San.” The duck quacks once and ventures closer to where Anthy has knelt down to be less threatening. The sound does have a mournful tone, but she does not look to be in distress at this exact moment. “Oh! I know I have some lettuce in my bento box,” she adds. “I’m not the best at cooking, but these are raw leaves so it should be fine.”

As the three of them eat their lunch together the sun doesn’t do anything as dramatic as burst through the clouds, but little by little the mist melts away and they bask in the dappled light that it leaves.

“Goodbye, little duck,” she says when they’ve finished. “I hope you find happiness in whichever role you settle on – and remember that you don’t need to choose only one, if you don’t want to. In fact, the person I’m looking for is _oh_ so many different things at once.” She smiles now. “And so am I.”


	2. Touga: Dominance

Curiosity has left the water that burbles beneath the Question Bridge, but atop it, Touga still wonders. What would it be like to dive down there? Could he possibly have the strength to run out of air? He’s had the breath knocked out of him before, and felt himself submerged in sensation he couldn’t put a name too, too ill-formed to even be called feelings. And each time he’s come up swinging, not at the ones who hurt him in the first place, but at anyone who made a target he might have a _chance_ of reaching. To wound and to entrance have always been different degrees of the same goal and he’s become exceptionally talented at every act on that spectrum. But to stop fighting entirely and rid the two people he actually cares about of the miserable wretch he is, that takes a different sort of strength, something he’s not sure he possesses.

It may all come to nothing, but – Touga shrugs – he has to _try_. The old wood of the railing creaks under his weight as he tries to climb it, threatening to tumble him into the river before he’s ready to make a good picture of his ending. Perhaps it is the sheer force of his personality which keeps the structure sound. Or else the story has more need of him staying between its margins than _he_ has need of the story to offer him a graceful exit. He’s not all the way at the top, feet hooked on the bar just below, and he extends his arms to either side, straining so hard that his fingers turn to static as if they are about to brush against the ends of the world itself. He lifts a foot to step into the air.

“Wait, what are you doing?” cries a musical voice creased with pity for something she does _not_ know anything about. “Please don’t, this can’t be what you really want!”

“You shut up,” he snaps, and he leaps. To his own surprise he is not falling towards the endless current but to the stable ground of the Question Bridge. If he had a cape it would be fluttering behind him. But he is, after all, a prince, and he feels the weight of the cloth almost before he completes the thought. “Yes, I truly crave oblivion, what of it?” Touga looks her up and down with a sneer. She’s dressed far too prettily, even for this town of pastoral perfection. All he can see is white and gold, gauzy enough that someone more inclined to overblown metaphor might even call her ethereal. Thank goodness Touga knows better. “Not that a little girl like you could possibly understand.”

“Touga–” she says, “Mr. Kiryuu. I understand you’re angry with the world and everything in it. I’m sure you must be afraid, too, if you’d consider oblivion. Won’t you _please_ tell me what’s wrong?”

There is a sword in his heart. How does she know his name? He raises his hand in anger, but then he sees it. The face and body are both so youthful, but there’s something about those eyes, something about that gently mocking smile and the way her hands are always positioned _just so_ to convey her feelings. She must be much older than she looks, unless she’s getting her information some other way. Has she been receiving letters too? The symbol hanging around her neck isn’t a rose crest, but he can recognize the weight it carries.

Fine, then she’s a Duelist. Well, he has a sword in his heart, so they’re evenly matched. “Draw, won’t you!” he demands when she just stands there watching curiously.

She refuses to answer Touga in words, which infuriates him, of course. Instead, the background music that’s been there all along just on the edge of hearing grows louder. As much as he tries to duel, it somehow always turns back into a dance. Whatever his maneuvers, she matches them step for step to make it look like he’s leading her intentionally. Even the instruments conspire against him – is he following their tempo or are they following him?

He stops fighting the music and decides to win from within the system because that’s the only thing that’s ever worked, no matter what the idealists say they believe. But a funny thing happens: he starts out focused on technique and discipline, practices absolute control over his body so no one else can. He’s good at this and _knows_ he’s good, but as soon as his dancing shifts to be about the _dance_ instead of beating the dance, he soars. Could this be the revolution he’s been seeking all along? It almost seems too easy.

The moment comes that he’s expended all his energy and his feet return to touch the earth. He can’t stop trembling and the sweat on his skin is beginning to cool. Something gives him enough support to keep from falling, and naturally he assumes it’s Princess Tutu until he sees her a meter away from him, speaking words he can’t hear over the rushing in his head. And she’s not even talking to him – or, she was, but now her focus rests on something that is no longer a part of him.

When the ghostly prince steps forward to say “I am the feeling of Dominance, turned inward in the name of self-defense,” Touga falls forward onto his knees and feels the scrape of wood against his palms, while a decade’s worth of unshed tears pour out of him. Somehow this aching sense of loss feels like a victory

“It’s time for you to return to the prince,” she tells the figure, who nods and condenses into a red jewel. Then she approaches Touga and puts a tentative hand on his shoulder, which a younger him would have shrugged off.

“My feelings… what I _really_ feel?” he says, keeping his eyes trained on the ground. The silence she offers is enough of a comfort for him to take a deep breath and look up. “When I was a boy, I grew out my hair as told by my father…” Her eyes widen as he continues. She’s too young to be hearing this, but _he_ was too young to have it happen to him. He edits the worst of it but not too much – she’s not a part of his childhood that he’s vowed to protect, after all, and once he’s begun the words become a runaway cart that he needs to keep chasing.

By the time he’s run out of words, she’s holding him tight, the kind of touch he’s needed for so long he’d forgotten it was missing. “Thank you,” she says, “For telling me. This must have been so hard to say.”

It _was_ hard, and he’s still weak from the memories, but the poison is draining from the wound, and he might be able to heal now. “Thank you,” he answers her.

*

If Princess Tutu cracks her shell, the shining thing that is revealed will be her, but there will be nothing eternal because she will have vanished. But if she reassembles the Prince’s heart before she bares her own, then she _might_ leave something lasting behind her. Maybe nothingness is itself an eternal thing, perhaps the _only_ eternal thing. Touga didn’t explain it very clearly even after she danced with the feeling of Dominance that had settled into his every action and after he stopped trying to force from her what she offered willingly. For all his posturing he is still a child groping for adulthood and he may not understand it himself. She is only a duck, but she is also a story, so maybe she has a chance.

What she has picked up from the recollection of his schooldays is this: Gold Crown Town is _a_ world, but it is not the whole world. Vanishing could just mean being forgotten, could mean writing herself off of the pages which someone else declared was all she was fit for, could be something absolutely different.

She feels the heft of the heart shard in her palm: it makes her stronger, but a little meaner, too, and she wonders again if returning it to Mytho is really the best thing for him. He’s already been changed so much by the Raven’s blood, and she’d almost say he’s become cruel. It would be so easy for Dominance to give him the power he needs to do something truly dreadful. But if she’s lucky, it will let the prince maintain control over himself for long enough for her and Fakir to save him from the poisoned love that’s becoming a part of him.

And besides, it’s not her place to decide what’s best for him. Her job is to find the pieces of his heart for as long as that’s what he wants, no matter how it hurts her.

*

Touga fiddles with the scissors in his hands for a long moment and steps over the threshold of his sister’s room. “Nanami? Will you please cut my hair for me?”


	3. Nanami: Self-Determination

Touga won’t stop talking about how much he hates Princess Tutu, but Nanami isn’t fooled: she knows what obsession looks like. When her brother really despises someone she simply disappears from his world. First he swears over the phone that he loves only her, while the girl in his arms smiles at the shared joke, then he stops picking up entirely. Why would he bother for an object of which he has no further need? She may have returned his phone to him, but she still remembers all those calls and tearful midnight messages.

But the thing is, she doesn’t think this girl is a rival for his affection. She must have done something extremely valuable for him, which he can’t stop thinking about because he doesn’t understand it. Every time Princess Tutu comes up in conversation – and Touga is always the one to start it – it always shifts to a tirade about how swordplay is far superior to ballet and how he hated every part of that ridiculous and humiliating dance.

Maybe he did, but even before he asked her to cut his hair he’s seemed lighter somehow, better able to say what he’s thinking without putting on a show of not caring. She wants to see what practicing that art form might do for her, too.

*

Nanami hovers near the barre and tries not to look out of place, but she isn’t quite sure what she’s supposed to be doing before class starts. She still hates not being the brightest star in the room, even though that hasn’t been the case for ages and she can see that’s probably good for her. It doesn’t help that she’s never danced before, so she’s surrounded by literal children in the beginner’s class. At least she’s had practice using her body when she was a Duelist, so she doesn’t have to start with the _absolute_ basics.

She watches some girls who seem to have it together out of the corner of her eyes and awkwardly imitates their movements. There, she’s fitting in, isn’t she? In a few weeks she’ll shoot to the head of the class and become the prima ballerina everyone wants to be friends with, and after she’s selected her most loyal followers she’ll have her old status back; she’ll have her _life_ …

“No, not like that!” someone says. “If you go too fast you’ll pull a muscle. Here, look–” The boy slowly rolls his spine until his palms are nearly touching the ground, and slowly comes back up.

“Tsuwabuki?” she asks, trying to reconcile this smiling face with the memory of a little kid who only ever wanted to be a big brother to her.

“No, I’m Fritz! Now we need to be quiet when Neko-Sensei comes in.”

“Neko… Sensei…?” she echoes, sure she just misheard, but the boy who says he’s not Tsuwabuki waves his hands frantically.

“No talking once he comes in, otherwise he’ll ask you to marry him,” he hisses.

When the grey-furred teacher enters the classroom grooming his whiskers, she remembers a different cat, and with it, the moment she first learned about death.

Years ago, when she was much smaller and understood much less of the world, Nanami was late to her brother’s birthday party because she had to find the perfect gift for him. The care she took in placing the animal in its box should have been used on her own appearance because their parents found her tardiness enough of a disgrace without a ripped and muddy dress.

The kitten pushed her further from her parents because she couldn’t keep up appearances, but brought her closer to her brother, who loved it more than all his other gifts. But he loved it _too_ much, more than he loved Nanami, so the creature had to go. It was too dirty and bedraggled to stay in their home, after all.

But no, she’s not going to think about her brother right now. She decided to dance because of Touga, but not to be just like him: it’s time to learn how to be just like _herself_.

She gets through the group warmup fine, but without feeling any closer to the rest of her ensemble. Learning first through fifth positions is a fascinating challenge because she’s never thought to move her body in quite those ways before. It’s not the way ordinary people move, which she would have scoffed at once, but she can see now that it doesn’t have to be. Ballet is a stylized representation of stories larger than anyone’s life could possibly be. But she half remembers being a part of that kind of story, when everything that happened felt like the end of the world, so with practice these outturned toes and precise wrists will begin to feel as natural as all that melodrama did at the time.

And then they get to the movement exercises, because as Neko-Sensei says, “Technical proficiency is well and good, but the _feeling_ of your dancing is what will really make each of you shine.” She doesn’t understand what he means by that, or why it makes her so nervous to be surrounded by little kids pretending to be elephants stampeding across the plains, or bulls and matadors, or any other kind of animal, but the only thing for it is to just dive in and pretend she’s not scared.

But she can’t just pretend when he tells them to “be flowers floating lazily along a stream. Imagine the gentle current beneath your petals. Is the sun shining? Turn towards its rays.” Her mind’s eye shows her not a stream, but a river raging and thrashing, because that day there was no sun and the rain hadn’t started yet, but the wind was already turning the water into turbulence. And in the river a box, not nearly as nice as the first one that held the same cat, though the cat was much cleaner than it had been as a kitten.

Someone bumps into her because she’s standing stock still, remembering. She thought, right up until the moment it was too late to take it back, that she was simply removing an obstacle in the way of getting what she wanted. But something that dies doesn’t just go somewhere else; it just never comes back, so all she could do was run after this small thing that had trusted her, and say she was sorry.

“Miss Kiryuu, you really _must_ pay more attention in class, or I will have you **_MARRY_** me,” scolds the teacher, and between the residual guilt and the threat of a fate worse than death, she just can’t stay in that classroom any longer. She catches a glint off a gold frame as she runs, but doesn’t pause to look because she just has to get _out_ of here.

Nanami skitters to a stop and creeps to the edge of a wall, the better to spy. Two girls frog-march a third forward, hyping her up to live her dreams.

“Come on, guys, I told you already that I don’t think about Fakir like that!”

“No, you’re safe with us, Ahiru; you don’t have to lie about your feelings anymore!” says one.

“Yeah, even impossible dreams are good to indulge in sometimes, to give you a break from the cold harsh reality of daily living!” echoes the blonde friend, eyes shining with imagined dramas.

“You think so?” says the girl who must be Ahiru. “That doesn’t _seem_ right and – hey wait, I don’t want to do this at all!”

“Too late!” hollers the girl with dark hair, already banging on the door.

“At last, Ahiru, you’ve made it to the door to the Fabulous Fakir, how does it feel?”

Nanami sees the moment Ahiru shifts from reluctantly going along with it, to the realization that this is really happening, accompanied by a wordless moan. But it really is too late, and Fakir steps out, stern features wearing a questioning expression.

“Hi, I’m Lilie,” says the blonde one. “My good friend Ahiru would like to tell you something.”

He looks at the ‘good friend’ in question as she windmills her arms in protest. “Yeah?”

“Uh, me? Um, I – you – what am I even _talking_ about, this is really weird. I mean _is_ this weird? What, um, ah,” she stammers, before trailing off into unintelligible but clearly awkward laughter.

“Okay,” says Fakir. “Good talk.” And he shuts the door again.

As soon as he’s out of sight, Ahiru wobbles to the floor like a limp noodle. She flutters her eyes open and looks around. “Where’d Pike go?”

Lilie waves dismissively. “Oh, you know Pike! She loves to stir up trouble as much as the next person, but rarely sticks around for all the delicious fallout. But _you_ , Ahiru!” she says, squishing her friend’s cheeks like an adorable animal or someone _much_ younger, “you were fantastic!”

“What, _me_?”

“Of course, you! I thought I’d have to interfere, but you managed to humiliate yourself all alone. How does it feel to be so magnificently awkward?”

“Um, thanks,” says Ahiru. “I think?”

Nanami feels a frown form, watching this. It’s the kind of harmless teasing she used to inflict on all the flies in the swarm, or would instruct her friends to do to someone else on her behalf. She’d even tease her own friends just enough to keep them in line. Harmless at first, but she knows – they all knew, really – how it can wear a person down to be mocked constantly for something someone else made them do.

She is not the queen of this academy, or of the middle school, and she’s not even related to royalty as she once was, but she hasn’t forgotten how to wield power. Not as a ballerina but as a duelist, she commands the attention of all. It’s not easy in ballet flats, but she makes her steps echo down the hallway to announce her presence. “Just what is going _on_ here?” she demands and the two girls look up like they’re trying not to look guilty.

“Oh, I wasn’t really trying to bother Mister Fakir! We were just passing by and since he and I are sort of friends now, my _other_ friends thought that I should say something, you know, in passing, but then when he opened the door I forgot how to talk.”

“I could see that,” Nanami says dryly, and then she turns her attention to the blonde girl. “And you – Lillie, was it? What do you have to say for yourself?”

“That’s me, but _I_ can’t see how I’ve done anything wrong. I was just helping Ahiru here come out of her shell, is that a crime?”

“You may have meant well, which I sincerely doubt, but you have to understand that if you haven’t checked with the person you’re helping and it turns out they didn’t want it, you really haven’t helped them at all.

Nanami thinks of a girl she invited to a ball for the purpose of humiliating her, and then she thinks of that girl’s friend who didn’t know how _petrified_ she was by crowds because she never asked. Looking back on how she was then, she’s ashamed of herself, but she has to wonder whose unkindness hurt the Rose Bride more.

“Yeah, well, I don’t buy it,” Lillie mutters.

She smiles a little sadly. “I know. And I know I can’t sell it, either, because growing up is something you have to do for yourself, and in your own time. But if you keep treating other people as entertainment then eventually they won’t want to be around you. Just think on it, okay?”


	4. Juri: Seclusion

Juri never had a single sharp moment of redefinition like so many of her classmates have talked about since coming here. The closest she came to that was when she came to realize how many girls at this school also wore lockets of the girls they loved, often for all the world to see, but even that was a gentle coming-into-focus of her whole life. And even then, she didn’t just throw herself into the arms of the next lesbian she saw. There were so many walls – both inside and outside – that she had no choice but to take her time.

Even using that word, lesbian, was a big step for her. If there were a word for how she felt, and for the people who could make her feel anything at all, then maybe she could exist in this world as something other than a strange withdrawn creature.

She couldn’t simply forget the years of habit which locked her body up into uselessness whenever she even dared to think a girl was pretty. But she got herself better at reminding herself to relax her muscles, because no one was staring and waiting to bring shame to her. But that didn’t mean no one was looking, and after a while she caught the painter’s secret awestruck smiles, quickly hidden away. Now, looking over her girlfriend’s shoulder as she sketches – her _girlfriend_! – she finds it fun and a little silly to reminisce with her about those first few fumbling weeks.

“I still don’t really understand what it was they were all fighting over,” Malen admits. “It was a part of me for a while, and then it wasn’t, so they stopped paying attention to me and I got to be invisible again.” She frowns at a wayward mark for a moment and deftly turns it into a cloud above the wide and lonely ocean. “Or no, that’s not fair. When that crow woman came to the window the thorns grew so quickly that there was no way for Princess Tutu to get me out safely, but she did her best to keep me out of danger.” The speck suggesting a boat is joined by another and another until it’s a whole flotilla setting out or better yet – returning home.

“I’m glad she _did_ keep you out of danger. I’d hate to have never met you.” The sketch is getting to the point where Malen usually wants a bit of color for highlights and for mood, so Juri rises to get the cup of colored pencils for her.

“Thank you. We still might not have met, though, or it might not have meant anything. I thought perhaps when the Devotion to Rue had left me I’d be the same as I was before, but its passing let something open up within me which I hadn’t known was there before. I stopped caring about Rue when it was gone, because I could see she didn’t care about _me_ and never would. But that emotion chose me because some part of me would know how to recognize a beautiful girl when I saw one. And now…” Malen sighs happily. “There are so many beautiful girls, aren’t there?”

“Yes, but none of them are as beautiful as the one who smiles back at you,” Juri says, thinking of Shiori. “I thought for the longest time that there would only ever be the one great love, and that it was all the sweeter for never being spoken out loud for the world to tarnish, but it only ever hurt me in the end.” The tears that well up now must be for her younger self, and not for a love that never managed to blossom. She takes a shuddery breath. “I don’t wish her ill, I really don’t, no matter how many awful things we did to each other. I hope she’s happy. I hope she finds some way to be happy.”

“Hmm.” Malen tilts her head while looking at the easel. “Pass me the blue, will you? No, the darker one.” And a moment later the ocean has depth so real that Juri has to catch her breath at the sight. “Well, it might be finished here, or it might not. Either way, I’ll have to come back tomorrow to know for sure.” She tugs Juri down to kiss her. “It’s a journey.”

“A journey,” she echoes. “I like the sound of that.”


	5. Miki: Nostalgia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mytho is affected by the Raven's Blood here, and as such he is **not** a nice person right now, and very much a creepy emotionally manipulative jerk. Please keep that in mind before reading.

Miki had a sister once, someone who used to be a part of him, but whose face he can’t even hold in his mind. Whether he lost her or she left him, she’s gone now. What he knows for sure is this: a garden whose edges seemed to contain the entire world, four hands dancing along the keys of one piano, a too-sweet thing over too soon.

Whenever Miki plays for a ballet class instead of the penguin, everyone tells him what a beautiful job he’s done, so he never admits that the secret is loneliness. He always leaves space in his playing for his sister, so her ghost or her memory can join in. It just so happens to be the right shape for dancers to fit into so they can really express themselves.

He achieved technical perfection years ago, but his sister had the true genius and artistry which everyone insists on attributing to him. His fate was never to be a soloist, but to be the equal or inferior side of a pair, and if he adjusts how he plays and for whom, then he’ll have lost his sister all over again.

A forearm lands heavily on the high notes in a sweet discord, and Miki’s fingers skitter helplessly to a stop on the middle register. It’s the same mistake he always runs into, the one that runs through his head whenever something unexpected modulates the key of his life without warning him first. He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look this sudden hope in the face.

“Kozue?” he whispers. He thinks about her all the time but he can’t remember the last time he said her name.

“Oh Miki…” The voice is warm and smooth, but the laugh that follows is cold and harsh, almost cruel but intriguing all the same. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Miki turns and notices for the first time that the most popular danseur at school has hair exactly like that of his sister.

*

Miki plays the piano for himself and for his sister who is gone, but he does not mind that the prince of the academy keeps coming back to drink in his sounds. He does not practice his steps most days, but stands just beyond the threshold and always with something almost akin to bliss suffusing his features.

“You are such a pure thing,” Mytho tells him once, wonderingly, possessively. “It’s a wonder you don’t simply float up and away into pure nothingness.”

“Are you sure that’s a good thing?” Miki’s mouth twists at the taste of an uncertain idea. The sunlit garden was pure and he does want it back, so desperately that the song he composed there keeps reaching up through the keys and into his fingers, forcing him to play. But though he wants to revisit that time, he doesn’t want to _become_ it. And the next instant he can’t recall the distinction.

“Of _course_ it’s good, Miki.” The boy’s smile is no longer quite as kind as Miki used to think, though he wouldn’t go so far as to consider it cruel. “The _point_ of art, of anything really, is to be beautiful. Or if it must be ugly or selfish or fragile, then let it be _wholly_ so. Only then can it deserve to be loved, only then can it be complete.”

“Oh–” gasps Miki, for suddenly the prince has come fully into the room and pressed right up against the side of the piano to tilt his chin up.

“And you,” he purrs, “may be the most complete creature I’ve ever met.”

Miki cannot find words either to agree or protest because all he can do is keep looking into his eyes. They seem to have feathers within them, flocking to the irises. The view he gets is of an unfinished thing and he doesn’t think there’s anything more beautiful.

Without entirely meaning to he lifts from the piano bench, following the line of those strong but gentle fingers so he can fall into those sad but calculating eyes. But something goes wrong with the maneuver and all he does is fall, hitting the highest octave on his way down, his failure in forte. “I have to go!” he stammers.

He doesn’t realize until later that evening that he’s left his sheet music behind.

*

He plays the same song he always does when left to his own devices, but his fingers move slowly, more deliberately. There are times to get swept up in the feeling of remembering a feeling belonging to a specific moment, but right now is a time to savor the craftsmanship of his own long ago composition. All the pauses he’s built into his current arrangement speak of a time signature stamped onto his heart by the passing of the years and notarized by a tangible Absence.

It’s not just his sister that’s gone, he’s slowly coming to accept. The garden may have been destroyed or abandoned, or may have simply gone to seed, but even if it exists and has been properly maintained it is nowhere within the walls of this town. He’s wasted enough time searching up and down for it and gotten lost in the fairytale woods of this place, but there is no trace. He’s sure that he would recognize its ghost, some part of its echo would turn him into a tuning fork.

So the Sunlit Garden is lost to him. Not so long ago he would have done everything in his power to deny it to himself; not so long ago the revelation might have destroyed him. But though he registers the loss he does not feel it quite so keenly because he is too fascinated by the emerging idea of building a nest together.

*

“Miki,” says the prince, “ _Dear_ Miki, I would give you my heart if you give me yours. Won’t you say yes?”

Miki is surprised by this declaration but not startled; he has the composure to reach the end of the composition without skipping any notes, and by the time he gets there he thinks he already knew, a little, that this offer was coming.

They’ve been growing closer in the past several weeks – or has it been a few months now? Mytho remarks on Miki’s capable hands and the hair that’s always falling into his eyes about as often as Miki is struck dumb by his feathered eyes and the grace of his limbs as he leaps through the air. In fact, the more it sinks in, the more natural it feels that they should become, well, _something_.

“Or won’t you say anything?” Mytho’s trembling hands suggest that something inside him has started to crumble. He’s often soft, that’s one of the things Miki likes best about him, but there’s always been a kind of wall underneath that, and in this moment the prince is vulnerable like nothing he’s ever seen. He’s _afraid_ , Miki thinks, of what his response will be.

It’s a power and knowledge he could certainly use to hurt. Of course he never would, but he considers it for the length of the heartbeat pounding in his ears, because no one’s ever cared so much what _he_ had to say. But if he refuses Mytho and sends him away then he will be alone and probably never find another partner half as good.

“Then take my heart,” he pledges himself. “Take every part of me and I will play the keys of your spine while you dance through me.”

Mytho smiles when he says it, no sign of the crack that Miki thought he saw. He seems to glide backwards until he reaches the barre on the other side of the room. Either Miki wasn’t paying attention before or his leotard has changed in his journey across the boards. He is no stranger to transformations, and how could he be afraid of one so beautiful?

“Love only me,” he says, lifting his right wing. “Hate everyone else,” he continues with his left. The cloth drapes down from his arms in a half circle, the feathers forming such perfect radial symmetry that the pose puts Miki in mind of some dark sun.

And oh what a promise! He hasn’t belonged so _desperately_ to another living person since he and his sister decided that no one else mattered as much as the two of them and either of them alone was nothing compared to both of them together. He _wants_ that again, wants to be part of a pair the way he was always meant to be.

So Miki surrenders to love and droops like a puppet whose controller has relaxed the hold on his strings. And then he begins to dance. He never learned to dance, before, but it turns out that there’s nothing to it. All he has to do is become nothing and move as he is directed. He doesn’t even have to emote very much, and always he moves steadily closer to Mytho who stands ready to welcome him home.

Maybe it’s because they’re still so far apart or all the ravens and smoke that have filled the space, but his eyes are not so gentle as they were before. Now they are dark and hard, like two little stones. Miki loves this newly revealed part of him too, and he loves being just a little bit scared. As much of a relief as it will surely be to lose himself in the feeling of being part of a pair, they are not the same person and he can find just enough definition for himself in being the part that gets scared.

He doesn’t know how much time he loses in losing himself, just that everything moves slowly around him while he himself jerks forward with a crude, unstoppable, clockwork force. Someone asks a question and he hears himself answer but the words slip away from his comprehension even as they travel from heaving chest to chapped lips.

A beautiful girl addresses the part of him condensed into a sword in the hands of a prince. “I, too, have been many different things – that is, many different people – and I often long for those times in my life, when everything seemed simpler. But trust me, Miki; too much Nostalgia can only cause pain if you’re not thinking about the present as well.”

Miki, no longer a puppet, finds himself sobbing on the ground. “I’m scared to let go.”

“You don’t have to, not all the way. Just, let it be something that lets you _grow_.”

The sword splits then into two parts – one that is and was the prince, and the other which is Miki finally returning to himself.

*

Miki thought he would be a lot more nervous than he is. After all, this is his first public performance in years, and he was never driven to flee the stage like his sister did, but it’s still a weighty responsibility.

Perhaps the difference is that he is not on stage this time, but under it. His music is beautiful as ever, and he knows it, but because it is not the focus or the main reason the audience has come, he can relax into supporting the dancers above. And he’s not alone, either. No longer a soloist or half a duet, he is a member of an ensemble, each of them unique and valuable on their own, but unstoppable all together.

The theater fills with a palpable hush as outside the orchestra pit the lights go down and the curtain goes up. Miki spreads his fingers over the keys, the conductor raises her hands, and –

The overture begins.


	6. Saionji: Dormancy

Saionji is beginning to suspect he’s probably dead. He keeps remembering the weight of a sorrow not his own, but not the details of _whose_ pain he wished to take on to spare them, or what made living such an unbearable prospect. Ghosts are said to forget and if he got his wish – well, wasn’t there a coffin? Suppose he followed this person for whom he cared so much into despair, and ended up here?

Then again – Saionji rubs his bandaged hand – time alone can make a person hemorrhage their history, so who’s to say where this lapse in continuity came from? Because even if he _is_ dead, he’s also here, so he ought to make the best of it. He uses his uninjured hand to push himself up from the bench where he’s been in stasis and goes through the most basic kendo forms until those are all that matter.

“Wow, so cool!” A girl’s voice breaks through to where he is, low and almost raspy. He lets the facts – he is here, he exists, this is a dancing school – filter into him while she prattles on. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a Fakir girl through and through now that I’m over that silly Mytho phase, because there’s just no beating that air of mystery…” Saionji lets her words wash over him and become a new rhythm for his body because he might have heard those names before but that doesn’t mean anything to him.

“But you’re mysterious too, a little scary, even. I bet the only reason you’re even _this_ approachable is because you’re not surrounded by girls all the time, and I bet _that’s_ only because you’re so new here. Give it a month or two and they’ll be swarming all over you.”

_That_ makes him look up sharply. Sure he had groupies at the school he attended before, but they were in the minority and he was eternally playing second fiddle to the boy he can’t remember, around whose waist he wrapped his arms back in childhood. So no one’s ever suggested that _he_ could be the elite, the prince everyone _else_ wants to be. Not that he remembers, at least.

Now that he’s looking at this girl, really looking like he doesn’t intend to simply forget her as soon as he looks away again, what sticks in her mind is her hair. It’s dark pink – no, how could he think that when it’s clearly a muddied purple. The adolescence he’s glimpsing in this moment is somewhere between youthful innocence and royal corruption, which probably goes for most young people, really.

“Who _are_ you?” he demands. In the dim hallways of recollection, strands of pink hair fall like water between fingers which do not pull away. A different palm slaps a different girl, whose purple hair contrasts the red mark on her cheek when she looks up impassively. Hands fascinated by grief, hands intent on causing it, but which of those belong to him? “And what are you doing here?”

“Me? I’m Pike, I’m just Pike!” I’m sorry for bothering you. I’ll leave you to your practicing and you don’t ever have to see me again or even admit we’ve talked if you don’t want to. Sorry!” she says one more time for good measure.

Saionji exhales and lets himself feel the air leaving his chest. He’s so tired of being angry all the time, and acting angry even in the rare times that he’s not. “No, you can stay if you like,” he tells Pike at last. “Just. Be a little quieter.”


End file.
